My father, now dead, a mathematician without the slightest leaning toward the esoteric, once told me of driving by night with a friend through the hill country of North Carolina. Suddenly a large truck, lights blazing, came over a crest, passed through their car without a sound, and disappeared in the night. My father said that after a moment he asked, “Did you see what I saw?” The friend answered “Yes.” They said no more about it, to each other or anyone else. They would have been thought mad.
Over the years I have talked to various people, apparently sane, who have had unexplainable experiences. Some of these had dreamed of the death of someone who shortly thereafter died in the circumstances of the dream. Others were more similar to my father’s experience. Several remembered a sudden and terrible sense of the presence of something evil — this latter now called a “panic attack,” which explains nothing. Those involved seldom wanted to talk of such things in a scientific age for fear of being ridiculed.
But, one might reasonably ask, what could science, or scientists, know of these things? They can be neither proved nor disproved, nor repeated for study. And of course a number of equally improvable exploitations are ready to hand: the narrator is lying, or suffered a momentary imbalance of this or that neurotransmitter in his brain, or transitory dementia, or the delayed result of the ingestion of hallucinogen, and anyway the whole idea is so silly that we needn’t talk about it. Geez, it’s the kind of thing they believed in the Dark Ages.
Maybe.
But maybe not. JBS Haldane, the noted biologist, reported that he once “went into his home and saw himself sitting in his own chair smoking his favorite pipe.” ‘Irregular’ was his characterization, and he attributed the event to “indigestion.” This of course was ridiculous. He reported that he sat on himself and either he or the apparition disappeared and life went on. (JBS: The Life and Work of J.B.S. Haldane, by Ronald Clark, p.111) The event predictably was ignored, including by Haldane, as being too far outside of the expected.
In religious societies, such events, real or imagined, were easily explained. Apollo did it, or Yahweh, or angels perhaps, or poltergeists. Nature was thought to be in the hands of sentient beings more or less like humans. It was reasonable to think that they might throw lightning bolts or do all manner of unnatural things. Now we know, or think we do, that nothing can happen except in obedience to the laws of physics. This means that if something does, we will dismiss it.
The second paradox is that of morality. It is clear that a physical system, the only kind we believe to exist, cannot be either moral or immoral. A fire does not burn up a kindergarten full of children from malignity. It burns as it has to. And since we are physical systems as much as the fire is, we are no more moral or immoral than it is.
Evolutionary psychologists argue persuasively that no absolute moral standards exist. They have to insist on this as otherwise there would be something outside of physics and that would upset the whole apple cart.
And so they point to the relative nature of morality. In one decade, short skirts are thought immoral, in another perfectly acceptable; in the Old Testament, stoning adulterers to death was not just moral but a duty; today, no. Bombing cities is immoral when Germans do it to England, but moral when England does it to Germany. In many cultures, horrific torture has been normal, in others a cause for revulsion. What we call morality is only a set of evolutionary adaptations to facilitate the passing on of our genes (as indeed short skirts might).
The problem here is that evolutionary psychologists, decent people, do not believe what they profess. If I stoned a homosexual to death, as at times in the past has been thought proper, they would be horrified. I could reply, “Why? Your moral objection is merely a prejudice local to this time and place and has no absolute validity. In evolutionary terms the resources consumed by gays would be better spent on having children and passing our society’s genes.”
Here it is worth noting that evolution is a subset of physics. How is it not? DNA follows the laws of chemistry — that is, physics. Mutations caused by cosmic rays or anything else comport with physics. Nothing that occurs within or without an organism undergoing natural selection contravenes physics — as if it did, we would be back to the paranormal.
Finally, there is the question of death. This is very carefully ignored in the sciences. Biology treats death as merely the cessation of certain reactions. But biologists also die. Do we really believe that nothing comes after death? How do we know? If we admit that we do not know, then there is the possibility of all manner of things in heaven and earth beyond our ken and of uncertain effect on our world. Scientists will pooh-pooh this (all the way to the grave ….)
Perhaps existence is not the simple wind-up clock we tell ourselves it is.
#HiggsBosonsMatter
Come on people…this is funny shit…especially to dorks of all varieties.
DRUD: I wish I could offer a better explanation, but time and space constraints (heh heh) make it difficult. I’ve been trying to put this stuff int book form for two years now and it’s incredible frustrating. If this stuff interests you, read the Bohm book and The Zen Teachings of Huang Po for an intro. The thing is, I suspect this stuff has to be talked out in person and in dialog. Wish I could do better, but…
When I was 5 years old we were in a pretty major traffic accident. We were motoring down a highway in the midwest doing about 100 to 110 km per hour. A guy in a pick up comes off a perpendicular gravel road and doesn’t obey the stop sign – he creams us going about 70 km per hour himself and rolls. We are in a Jimmy – I am riding in the back cargo space (late 70’s so pretty common practice). I flew through the rear window as it broke and woke up a time later next to the vehicle in the ditch. I never had a bruise or a scratch of any consequence on me. Everyone else was injured pretty badly (my mother broker her back) and the guy who hit us was killed. I don’t remember the accident as it happened but was released from the hospital to the custody of my Grandparents a few hours after we were picked up – I never even needed a band aid. True story – just can’t explain it. Lucky maybe? Maybe…
My unexplained event:
In an old house I awoke to find a young boy, dressed in clothes I took to be from perhaps the early 1900s, standing beside my bed. He had a greenish glow, and was not entirely solid, and looked perhaps 7 years old. He was just watching me, and was obviously harmless. I spoke to him, but received no answer. He stood there a long time watching me, and me him. Finally I went back to sleep with him still there, as I was not afraid. I never saw him again.
I have no explanation. If it was a dream, it is one I can clearly remember now for almost 40 years, and I cannot think of any other dream I can remember. Whatever it was, it was clear, and seemed very real to me.
Very unusual indeed. And I was sober.
Some IBM scientists a few years ago displayed a bunch of ‘balls’ arranged to spell the letters IBM. These were individual atoms or there representation because, any physicist would tell, you an atom cannot be seen because it is smaller than the wavelength of visible light. Electron microscopes don’t ‘see’ anything they simply ‘feel’ the shape of something too small to be seen by noting how a beam of electrons reacts as it passes over the ‘object’. This is translated back into a visual pattern our eyes can detect. Its ‘braille’ on the nano scale.
Everything we experience is constrained by the properties of matter that are only valid according to our experience and theories. You can jump off the Empire State Building without any consequence if you can overcome the electromagnetic force that makes like charges repel each other. It ain’t the concrete sidewalk that will kill you it is the cells of your body being torn apart by electromagnetic resistance at the atomic level. You never really even ‘hit’ the sidewalk.
The speed of light is a ‘limit’ only because without it we’d have no frame of reference. Time would have no meaning as you could go forward or backward but physicists have had to ‘explain’ the big bang by saying it was once possible for space to expand far faster than the speed of light by billions of times in order for the everything to be where it is today. A galaxy could not be 10 billion light years away from us if the universe could not expand faster than light otherwise that galaxy would have to be occupying the same space we are.
Lipoh ,you underwent an alien abduction. Unfortunately everyone knows aliens are just dressed up demons from Hell.Now you know how you got brain damage.50 bucks please. That’s my fee.
The rest of you just took to many drugs during the. …summer of love……1967.
What if there is no time? What if our prescription of time is an attribute of something else that we have no clue about? A mirage or an illusion. If there is no such thing as time there are all kinds of possibilities.
The way we mark time is by the rotation of the earth the four seasons and the movement of the earth around the sun. All we did was make up a type yard stick based on these observations. What doe’s our construct have to do with anything other than what we think we see?
Time may very well exist but I’ll bet it doesn’t work the way we believe it dose. If time exists its a thing, a thing one might feel the effects of but it’s invisible. You can’t bottle it, mine it, taste it, touch it, see it, store it up, and you can’t make it.
There must be lots of time out there so where is it. They say it takes x amount of time for the light of a distant galaxy to reach us. How do we know that for sure? Because we use our earth constructed yard stick to measure something that’s invisible in the first place?
So how can we truly measure it. If time exists it might be the super natural that we all have some perception of even if we’re wrong. Time may not be time at all but the very hand of God or maybe one of his fingers.
Anyway we are all doomed and if there is time it’s running out. So don’t waste any time. Get ready for the the chaos and carnage to come in a short time or maybe a in little longer time than that.
unit472 says: The speed of light is a ‘limit’ only because without it we’d have no frame of reference. Time would have no meaning as you could go forward or backward but physicists have had to ‘explain’ the big bang by saying it was once possible for space to expand far faster than the speed of light by billions of times in order for the everything to be where it is today. A galaxy could not be 10 billion light years away from us if the universe could not expand faster than light otherwise that galaxy would have to be occupying the same space we are.
You started out great but then I had to call bullshit, here’s why:
Stephen Hawkins said that mass increases as its speed increases. And if you could go faster than the speed of light, your mass would be as big or bigger than the universe itself. I tried to say all this once before but I guess it all sounded like I was masturbating; I said that God made the universe out of nothing by tearing negative and positive charges apart. The energy released in the big bang eventually congealed to form gaseous clouds and then matter, stars and other space junk.
Hawkins said that if you met your antimatter self, don’t shake hands or you’ll both disappear. That gives me the impression that my idea is correct, all matter and anti-matter add up to nothing and that would be the original state of things before the big bang.
dc.sunsets says: No one knows the answers. Some questions cannot even BE answered. So why bother asking them?
What if there’s life after death for me, but not for anyone else who came before or since? What if my experience of this reality is entirely a construct of my mind, and in fact I’m actually the Great Creator slumming it as one of its creations?
Did I just waste my time ‘splaining to you mongrels that DC has existential issues and his questions have more to do with philosophy than with religion? But no, you insist on your comfortable ignorance:
Speaker One, 2 + 2 + 4
Speaker Two, Oh noes, that sounds like religion, I can’t accept it.
DC, that was maybe one of ten lessons Doctor Pangloss covered in his Intro to Philosophy, he said if you imagine you are the creator of all reality and nothing really exists but what you create with your imagination, then it follows that you are insane because you are talking to yourself when you interact with imaginary ‘others’.
Stop calling everything “religion”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!That’s just a “cop out” to avoid even the intimation of your mortality and the prospect of eternity.
Philosophy is the examination of everything having to do with reality, matter, the universe and the nature of consciousness, among other important shit.
This is TBP, this is not some Muslim site where certain subjects are taboo. Please come here with and open mind, a mind not closed to imagination and the investigation of interesting things.
What you shy away from is not even religion, per se, it is theology – the study of a religious system. Like your particular theology doesn’t stink. Anything that seeks to explain or explain away the existence of God or gods IS a theology.
@Bruce
Was thinking of this the other day after a conversation with my teenage son about Dr. Who paradoxes – time and how it is sort of a human construct – a measure of entropy between existence and non existence. Then I came across this article from Wired…
http://www.wired.com/2010/02/what-is-time/
bruce says: What if there is no time?
bruce, you are channeling unit472 who suggests that a falling body never hits the ground.
On that point, Doctor Pangloss said that if you shot an arrow in the air and you divided the time it took to reach the highest point and then dividd the time it took to to hit the ground, in minutes, seconds, minute seconds, and then milliseconds, nanoseconds, and so on, the arrow never hit the ground since you can keep dividing time forever…
Just as fire requires fuel, heat and oxygen, the material plane requires matter, space and time. S Hawkins said that the gravity of a black hole is so great that neither light nor time cannot escape its ‘event horizon’. It is in effect, a Polaroid picture out in space.
I forget who said it, I thought it was St Thomas Aquinas, that God created time so that things could change. Hawkins said that the moment you arrived at the event horizon of a black hole, time would stop and you would never, ever touch down. you would forever be arriving. You become a conscious part of a Polaroid picture, your thought frozen like a scratched record.
I’ve read through this twice, and there’s only one comment I can and will make, and I’ll make it and go back to anonymity…. and it is because I’ve seen his name and inane fucking stupid comments time and time again… this is directed straight to you, ‘Stucky’…
You, and only you, are the most pretentious, arrogant cunt on the internet, period and bar none. You, like most citified new yankers, have no intelligent response, because you are so sure of your intellectual superiority. There is no reason for you to think that, other than your mom using it to coax you up from the basement to eat your spaghetti-o’s. There are none so blind as those who WILL not see. Even if it wasn’t scriptural, it would still apply to cocksmokers like you. I’m sorry it hurts when you get fucked in the ass, but please stay in whatever video game world you inhabit, stroking your tiny penis, and leave discourse to those with cogent, well thought out responses.
And know, that when society falls apart, pussies like you get shot first, just so you’ll shut the fuck up.
No one cares about your thoughts or opinions. Go kill yourself.
Violence, we try our best to keep the conversation going. If you disagree with Herr Stucky, then he has succeeded in making you think. If everybody agreed with Stucky then this would not be a blog but some sort of internet church. What is interesting is that you are not offended by any of our other illustrious trolls or intrigued by any of our other brainy free thinkers.
Please come back to share your valuable thoughts and suggestions for improving this site, Admin really wants to make this site a shining beacon on a hill, a lighthouse on a mountaintop, if you will, in case the world floods again.
ah, the coyote. .. then in my age and decrepitude, I have succeeded in engendering thought from you. .. I am old, yes, but I tire from those who eschew cognitive discourse for mealy mouthed nonsense, such as that which spews from ‘Her Stucky’ (Herr being a Germanic honerative I see no place for here…
as our western, judeo-christian civilization passes into decline, his is one of those voices – much like nails on a chalk board – that I fervently wish would just go away.
Either add to the discussion, or simply go away. No sentient being is interested in his ranting…. the foam on his lips is our clue
Stucky says:
When I was in 12th grade I took my dad’s Bonneville out on Highway 287 late at night to see how fast it would go. The speedometer was BURIED at 120mph, when suddenly I hit a pothole. The front tire went flat and I lost control of the car. It spun around four times then hit the center divider which sent the car flying. I was airborne for about 300 feet and landed on railroad tracks, where the car stalled. Just that moment a freight train came barreling down the tracks doing 80mph, and hit me head on. However, the train went right through the car like an airplane flying through fog. I was still 5 miles from home, and it was late at night, so I asked Jesus for help. He came right away with a new set of spark plugs and the the car miraculously stated right up. I drove the battered to hell car home, parked it in the driveway, and said some more prayers cuz I knew my dad would beat my skinny ass. However, when I woke up in the morning I went outside and the car was like brand new! Jesus and the apostles must have fixed it while I was sleeping. That noon, after I ate my liverwurst sandwich, I asked Jesus into my heart. He’s been fixing my cars ever since. Every bit of this story is true. This really works, people! Trust Jesus, there is no other way.
Stuck, 2 comments:
A. Your story reminds me of a character in One Hundred Years of Solitude, he was shot and loaded into a train (your story has a train, but wait, there’s more) he walks back home still injured (just like you did) he locks himself in his workroom and ‘lives’ there the rest of his ‘life’ although nobody can see him except members of the family.
2. My buddy from Wisconsin said he got home late at night, stoned out of his mind. He was feeling hungry and thought a glass of milk would be just the ticket. He was headed upstairs with the glass of milk when he heard one of his parents. He hurried upstairs, tripped, dropped his glass of milk but he didn’t want to be seen in that state so he ran to his room, jumped into bed and fell asleep quick. When he awoke the next morning, his full glass of milk was on the nightstand.
c’mon, Stuck…. I perceive it past your bedtime, but you are surely narcissistic enough to breathlessly await a comment with your ‘nom de cunt’ in it, no? Or has mom locked up the computer, to keep you away from anime’ porn? Rather than these kind and easy folks, take me to task, bitch. You want to debate Christendom, then step up to a Crusader… give me an enemy worth my metal.
or let the coyote fight for you…. I had such hope here, kids. But no, everyone wants to bash Christians, until they meet a Crusader….
Violence, Stuck is one of the most productive and thought provoking commentators on this site. If you don’t like him now, wait 15 minutes, he will change his tune. Today he is a neo-con, tomorrow he wants to see cops swing from the trees. One day he loves everybody, the next day he is a flaming shameless racist. He is delightfully unfettered by the chains of consistency. Nor is he tarnished by decorum and the social graces that make cowards of us all. In a word, we all love him, even those of us who don’t.
And you can trust me when I say all this because he isn’t even my friend, he said so, he said, Coyote, I ain’t your friend. What a dick. Your right, Violence, he should just kill himself, fucking asshole that he is, he probably won’t do it.
Stucky says:
Montefrío
I gotta hand it to you …….. you are the most pretentious motherfucker on this site.
Stucky says:
“… but I’m sure the LORD was watching over me.” ——— bb
You rejoice at the rape, torture, and death of a young woman simply because she’s a liberal.
And you think Jesus gives a fuck about you? You have a rich fantasy life. My gut feel is that Jesus thinks you’re a dick. Seriously. You don’t display even one iota of evidence of being a Christian.
Yes, do come to NYC and buy me a beer …. that will put me in the mood to stick a rusty fork in your eye, and twist it.
C’mon, Coyote. .. if you’re gonna quote the fuck, then quote him. Don’t look for the innocuous shit… post what the fucker said… and Fucky, since you don’t have the cojones to stick a fork in someone’s eye, please….. shut. the. fuck. up.
violence says:
c’mon, Stuck…step up to a Crusader… give me an enemy worth my mettle.
Fixed it for you.
Coyote, I will take your word for it, since you seem to have stones to back your play. I’ll believe Stucky a chameleon… hopefully in the coming excitement it will work to his favor.
Until someone shoots him.
no, Coyote, I meant “metal”. But thanks though, I haven’t had this much fun in a while. I feel like I owe you money. Not enough to actually pay you… but close.
I wasn’t quoting him. I rarely interact with him, we are not on the same plane.
He was addressing bb who is not me and I am not bb. Unless DC is correct and I am the creator of my own reality and everybody in it, then yes, I would be he (but I’m not).
violence, you sound like somebody who can really add to the discussion, please do come back tomorrow during business hours. I’m sure Stuck will be eager to clarify his point of view. Welcome, Christian soldier!
Violence – I am sure Stuck will be happy to jam his size 18s up your ass. I suspect you like it without lube.
Atheist are still creationists, they just believe their creator is not conscious and smart like they are.
razzle, that sounds like religion, I can’t discuss it.
I so love this place. So very, very, much.
Dear Violence, won’t get into it with you – I’m against wasting time for the sake of wasting it – but there is an actual REASON for “Herr” Stuck.
You implied you have been lurking awhile, yet you know nothing of one of our most prolific authors, makes me think you are just passing through spreading discord.
Which is great, we like the chance to fight new battles.
I still love you Stuck.
Back to the article and Schrodinger.
Way back when, I’ll guess I was 7 or 8, I had NO idea that there were microscopic bugs/mites whatever crawling all over our skin, hair, eyes, and everything around us. My reality was my skin was bug free.
Once I read that damned book, I could FEEL those mites on me all the damned time.
It took me years to get over the constant feeling of crawling.
Reality, in my case, totally required an observer having a change of knowledge.
Until you experience it, it cannot be “explained” to those that “demand proof.”
@bb, get over your damned occult/demonic crap. God has asked mediums, profits and seers to assist with spreading his word for millennia. Just because the Catholic church wanted a lock on ALL spirit (helped their coffers immensely to kill the “witches” and “healers” and take their stuff), didn’t mean God agreed.
My mother is NOT from the occult, and as my very first experience was when I was 7, I had never heard of a satanist, let alone practiced with one.
And, just a thought, maybe God is sparing you because you aren’t ready to be accepted into Heaven. It occurs to me that maybe my dad has been kept around so long, not to torture us kids, but maybe, just maybe, so that he might look inside and realize all the sins he should repent before he goes.
Might be the same for you, or not. I discovered long ago that the truly holy are called home early, but the closed minded and evil seem to last forever. I think it’s because God wants them to pull their heads from their asses. He loves us after all.
“I still love you Stuck.” ———- TE
Ditto.
I bought a book about Quantum stuff a long time go …. one of those “for Idiots” type books, but even simpler. Supposedly. I read it slowly. Like no more than a page or two at a time. I never did “get it”. Makes my head hurt. Stuff is too crazy for me … above my pay grade.